Saturday, April 13, 2013

Nonsan Strawberry Festival

Last weekend I traveled to Nonsan for their strawberry festival. Nonsan is south west of Daejeon and takes about 30mins by train to get there. It had been raining the day before which made the ground stupidly wet and muddy in some places, but overall it was a good day. I took lots of pictures so I will let them do most of the talking.The entry gate

Strawberries ^^.

Koreans love their rice cake.

This is a making rice cake demonstration. In the metal container is some steaming hot freshly cooked rice.

They then put the rice on the big wooden board (note the strawberries in the blue container).

They then make a hole in the middle of the rice and put the strawberries in it (blue container now empty). Using their hands they mix the rice and the strawberries together and smush it up as much as they can.

Now for the fun. You get to hit the big pile of rice with a big wooden mallet the size of a sledge hammer. There was a guy with a microphone busy pulling foreigners out of the crowd so they could have a go. I had a good laugh at the two people before me. They were girls and they were hopeless. I couldn't wait to show everyone what the Australian could do ^^.

Raaaaaaawwwwr!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I smushed it good. Look at the expression on the Korean faces. Love it!

We then wondered around some of the food tents looking for something to eat for lunch.

This guy here was amazing. He was making chinese noodles from scratch using a big pile of dough. Check out the video below.

I was impressed by the skill of the guy making the noodles so I decided to eat there.... not one of my best ideas. The food was pretty average.

They also had some animals on display in one of the tents. I felt so sorry for the animals stuck in the cages.

But even more sorry for the poor animals (guinea pigs, mice, etc) that were getting strangled by unsupervised children who had never handled an animal in their life.

A child dropped this poor guy in one of the boxes after scaring him half to death. I felt so sorry for him. I wanted to put him in my jacket and take him away from that evil place. We gave him a few moments of rest from the children before carefully placing him back in the box and wishing him luck.

And here are some random photos of the festival.

I am not sure what these guys have to do with Korean culture, but they were at the festival playing some catchy tunes. I filmed this with my Sony RX100 camera. I am happy with how well it picked up the audio. There is a little bit of wind noise (there was strong wind) but overall I think it did a pretty good job.

I thought these were super cool. I wanted to have a go.

After we had seen everything at the strawberry festival we started walking back towards the train station. On the way we passed a traditional market place and decided to check it out.

Some super fresh fish. Some of the fish were sill moving their mouths and trying to breath.

Dried fish

And some dried stingray. I am unsure what they use this for. My guess would be they put it in soup.

The local hardware store.

Now, this photo may upset some people so skip to the next photo and stop reading NOW.... In the picture below is dog meat. This isn't common in Korea but there is still a market for it.

Some fresh meat

And next door some fresh chicken.

And here is some.... Kimchi. In Korea there are about 200 different types of Kimchi. Every region has their own variation and even within regions the Kimchi available is very diverse. You can read more about Kimchi here.

And some pigs feet. They boil it up in kind of a stew and the meat just falls off the bone. I have been told it is good but I am yet to try it.

The market was a maze of streets but in the center of it all was some old belting out their favorite songs to some poorly amplified (very loud) music. The old guy in orange was busy dancing while an old woman was singing.